Rokossovski, Konstantin Konstantinovich (1896–1968)

Polish-born Marshal of the Soviet Union. He came to prominence during World War II as commander of the 16th Army defending Moscow in 1941, and played an important role in pushing the Germans back from Soviet territory. He was Polish defence minister and commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces (1949–56) and deputy prime minister of Poland (1952–56). In 1956 the new Wladyslaw Gomulka regime dismissed him in response to widespread popular anti-Russian feeling, and he returned to the USSR. From 1961 he was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Rokossovski was born in Warsaw, Poland. During the Revolution of 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks. At the outbreak of hostilities between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1941, Rokossovski, as a lieutenant-general, commanded one of the armies defending Moscow, Russia. In 1942 he took command of the Don Front which pinned the German 6th Army of von Paulus in Stalingrad November 1942–January 1943. He then commanded the Central Front at the Battle of Kursk, holding the German attack and then counter-attacking in an offensive which carried him to the line of the River Dniepr. In 1944 Rokossovski commanded the 1st Belorussian Front, his group taking a leading part in the Russian summer offensive of 23 June–31 August 1944. His great victory in these operations was that of Bobruisk, Belarus, where, in five days' fighting on the southern part of the central zone, he utterly defeated the German 9th Army. Rokossovksi was in command of the Soviet armies on the Vistula River in Poland at the time of the uprising of the Polish Home Army under Gen Bor-Komorowski in Warsaw, when requests from the British and Americans for the use of Soviet airfields for supplying the insurrection were refused. When both Poles and Germans had been virtually destroyed, he captured Warsaw in January 1945. In command of the 1st and 2nd White Russian armies, he then advanced across Poland, took Danzig, and isolated the German armies in Kurland, finally making contact with the British at Wismar on 5 May 1945. Following the war, he was appointed commander-in-chief of Soviet forces in Poland, despite the role he had played during the war in crushing Polish independence.